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Gary Yourofsky

About Gary Yourofsky

Gary Yourofsky (born August 19, 1970) is an American animal rights activist.

Yourofsky was sponsored by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) between the years 2002–2005, and has given many public lectures promoting veganism. In 2010, Yourofsky's popularity quickly accelerated around the world (especially in Israel) following the release of a YouTube video titled Best Speech You Will Ever Hear showing him giving a speech at Georgia Institute of Technology, as the video gained millions of views and has been translated into tens of different languages. Yourofsky has been admired and depicted as a hero by many, but criticized by others for his alleged extreme views. He has been arrested 13 times between the years 1997–2001, and has spent 77 days in a Canadian maximum security prison in 1999, after raiding a fur farm in Canada, releasing 1,542 mink in 1997.

Who taught me that animals were put on this Earth for food? Who taught me to disrespect animals and view them as mere commodities? Who stole my compassion, my empathy and my conscience? Who lied to me? Who instilled this vicious mindset of human-to-animal exploitation as standard operating procedure?

Thou shalt not kill: the four most important, and yet, most ignored words in all religious teachings. There is not an asterisk next to that commandment saying "Unless you walk on all four and have fur, feathers, horns, beaks or gills".

The worst scream I have ever heard, by far, is a mother cow on a dairy farm screaming her lungs out day, after day, after day for her stolen baby to be given back to her. And why do they steal babies from their moms? Well, the dairy industry can't have little babies sucking up all that milk that was meant for them. Every time you have a glass of cow milk, some calf is not.

The problem is that humans have victimized animals to such a degree that they are not even considered victims. They are not even considered at all. They are nothing; they don't count; they don't matter. They are commodities like TV sets and cell phones. We have actually turned animals into inanimate objects: sandwiches and shoes.

Sometimes I think that the only effective and productive method of destroying speciesism would be for each uncaring human to be forced to live the life of a cow on a feedlot, or a monkey in a laboratory, or an elephant in the circus, or a bull in a rodeo, or a mink on a fur farm. Then people would be awakened from their soporific states and finally understand the horrors that are inflicted on the animal kingdom by the vilest species to ever roam this planet: the human animal!

It is not your right — based on your traditions, your customs and your habits — to deny animals their freedom so you can harm them, enslave them and kill them. That’s not what rights are about. That’s injustice.

Is slavery - owner, victim, profit, and domination - exclusive to the human race? Have blacks, Jews, women and children been the only victims of this atrocity? Have not cows been enslaved? What about pigs, chickens, turkeys, fish, sheep? If they're not enslaved, then what are they? Free?

If you are not the victim, don't examine it entirely from your point of view because when you're not the victim, it becomes pretty easy to rationalize and excuse cruelty, injustice, inequality, slavery, and even murder. But when you're the victim, things look a lot differently from that angle.

I know you have the capability to understand right from wrong because you hate people who harm children. Well, why not despise people who harm animals? It's hypocritical! Why protect one and violate the other when neither one wants or deserves the abuse? They just wish it would end. Stop praising the innocence in children then ignoring or making fun of the innocence in animals.

Every November, during the certain holiday people love so much, people take a dead turkey, open up the dead turkey's ass, or carve out a really big hole in their ass, take some stuffing and shove it inside their dead empty ass, and use the little dead ass as an oven to bake some bread. Somebody else's dead empty bacteria-laden ass to make bread? Ass bread?! And people think vegans are weird? Because we eat tofu? And rice, and beans, and lentils?

How You Can Help

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Print, print and print out what you like. Add one to that space on the noticeboard at work. How about that billboard on the way to the café? If there's room and it's legal, print out a few posters and tape them to boards, lamp posts and bus shelters.

Got a friend's birthday coming up? Or just want to treat your sister? It's pretty cost effective to print out your favourite posters (even at a professional printers), throw it in a suitable frame and wrap it up - gift sorted!

Quote Of The Day

Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.